Farage, the money launderer and me: a decade of denial

Why now? That’s one of the question I keep on being asked. Why are Nigel Farage’s finances suddenly under scrutiny with a rightwing Murdoch-owned newspaper leading the charge? 

It’s a good question, and one that has many answers, but the short one is: Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because “challenging” Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it. 

I don’t want to be the one to break this to Mr Murdoch, but this is the same story I’ve been reporting on for a decade. It’s the same cast of characters. The same dark money. The story currently across Britain’s front pages isn’t just about Farage and Reform: it’s Brexit too.

That’s not me trying to reopen a culture war; it’s simply the facts. Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage. 

Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign. During this time, he’s been completely ignored by most of the UK’s political journalism establishment. 

Because this is how UK political journalism works. 

In the first episode of “Posh George”, the Sunday Times’s new podcast, Gabriel Pogrund, the journalist leading the latest scoops, explains he spent a decade as a political reporter in Westminster, where Cottrell’s extraordinary background and ongoing involvement with Farage was an open secret. “Posh George,” he admits, was seen as “old news”: “one of those things that Westminster just knew about”.

What’s changed? Well, Pogrund is an impressive reporter. He was recently appointed to a new gig as editor of the Sunday Times’s prestigious Insight team. And as one veteran investigative journalist said to me this week, Murdoch will have seen it. And he must have given it the nod. 

For a decade, I’ve dined out on my George Cottrell anecdotes. Because that’s all they were good for. My reporting into Nigel Farage and his source of funding was cut off at its peak. 

In 2018, I actually flew to Australia to gatecrash an event I knew he would be at, frustrated by his refusal to answer my questions and with the journalists who did have access to him’s failure to ask the right ones. 

He walked off within minutes. But – with the then Observer, now Nerve team – I published a long investigative piece about Farage in which Cottrell prominently featured. Months later, Farage’s main funder, Arron Banks, filed a lawsuit against me and killed my investigation dead. 

It took the Guardian many years to take up the money trail again and even longer for me. I’ve set up an entirely new news outlet with my colleagues to do so: the one you’re reading. 

George Cottrell has always been a story. Nigel Farage’s finances have always been a story. And who funded Brexit is still a story because it’s the same story. The same dubious sources of finances. But Farage – and his funders, who include Arron Banks and George Cottrell – were off-limits for years for the rightwing Brexit-supporting press.

And Banks’s lawsuit against me scared off the rest. This past fortnight has marked some great journalistic success – by both Anna Isaac in the Guardian and Sunday Times – but also a decade of journalistic failure. 

Last Sunday, I added a few thoughts on Twitter about the new stories and as I typed I couldn’t help bash out this one too: 

If that strikes you as somewhat pathetic, with overtones of anger and despair, you’d be close enough. This week, I met a former senior Reform leader, and he said: “I have to ask you, why do you continue to do what you do?” I’ve been mulling on that too. 

The honest answer is that I have a complicated relationship with power. And what I’ve realised is that Britain does too. 

George Cottrell has operated in plain sight for a decade because he could. 

Only in Britain could a convicted money launderer and close aide to the potential future prime minister publish a book with the title How to Launder Money and receive not a whisper of attention, as Cottrell did earlier this year. 

Last week, we learned the Met police are investigating donations from George Cottrell and his mother to Reform UK. This is game-changing news. But if you’re wondering why Reform was dumb enough to accept donations from the mother of an offshore money-laundering crypto expert and convicted criminal, it’s because the lack of any serious scrutiny of Farage created a sense of impunity. 

The persecution of one of the very few journalists to attempt that scrutiny – me – was both necessary and performative. It shut down the reporting for years. It silenced me at the peak of the story. And it was also a punishment intended as a warning. It worked. 

It infected the authorities too. I’ve watched the Met police drop investigation after investigation into cases against multiple Brexit-related political actors and campaigns with no explanation and no transparency. 

And when the authorities did act, they were also punished. Arron Banks didn’t just sue me for defamation, but the Electoral Commission too. 

You won’t know that, of course, because, like my trial, it was barely reported. London’s media lawyers have been deployed not just against journalists but public officials too. The Electoral Commission made statements about the flow of foreign money into UK politics and it – and separately its director, Bob Posner – were sued. 

The details – see below – are extraordinary and, in the current context, chilling. Because it wasn’t just me who was silenced. The commission removed three pages from its website as part of an “amicable” settlement. They included its warning about foreign donations.

Another regulator who investigated the Brexit campaigns – the Information Commissioner – was told by counter-terrorism officers that she was the subject of illegal surveillance. It was claimed in parliament that MI5 had found evidence that Banks’s private intelligence company were electronically surveilling her. Counter-terrorism officers swept her house, office and car. She was told to change her daily routine. 

This is a decade-long story not just of denial and impunity or even of a supine and complicit press owned by an array of offshore oligarchs. It also documents a direct attack on the institutions that are meant to protect us. 

What happens next is a test. Can we finally acknowledge the vulnerabilities that an explosive combination of technological change and dark money has created, and the perilous position Britain is in?

George Cottrell was Farage’s right-hand man during the Brexit campaign. His official title was Ukip fundraiser, and although just 22, he was the person by Farage’s side. In November 2016, when I first started to investigate the money behind Brexit, a brilliant primary source had just been published: The Bad Boys of Brexit, a “memoir” of the campaign by Arron Banks

It was actually written by Isabel Oakeshott, the former Sunday Times journalist and now partner of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, and it’s a rollicking account. She was actually there with both Cottrell and Farage when, in the summer of 2016, federal agents boarded their plane shortly after they landed in Chicago O’Hare airport. Cottrell was arrested and charged with 21 counts of money laundering. 

I was gobsmacked reading it because the arrest, months earlier, had made little to no noise in the UK press. Here was a money launderer, versed in using crypto and the dark net, at the heart of the Brexit campaign. What? But it’s all there, played for laughs, because that was the Bad Boys of Brexit shtick. 

Banks, who funded Farage’s campaign, and his sidekick and comms guy, Andy Wigmore, presented their team – which also included Gawain Towler, Ukip’s press spokesman, and man-of-the-moment George Cottrell, “Posh George” – as the UK political equivalent of Top Gear. And it worked. 

Both Wigmore and Towler were sources for Fleet Street’s finest. Westminster works on a quid pro quo basis: gossip is traded and sometimes exchanged for political air cover. And the Bad Boys of Brexit were particularly gossipy, disarming even, by the standards of Westminster. Even the Guardian’s Marina Hyde flew with the Banks and Wigmore entourage to Washington to write up the party they threw for Farage at Trump’s first inauguration.

Cottrell was simply the punchline to yet another joke. 

Months later, he agreed to a plea deal, pleading guilty to just one charge of wire fraud. In court, he admitted to participating in a scheme “to advertise money laundering services on a TOR network black-market website” and was sentenced to eight months in prison. His indictment read like an airport thriller. Federal agents hired him on the dark web to launder drug money through crypto. They arranged to meet him at a Las Vegas restaurant they’d hired out and stacked with agents who posed as both diners and staff. 

When he came out of prison, Cottrell did a single interview, published in the Telegraph. He claimed his “youth and inexperience were exploited”, though the court docs made clear he’d advertised his money laundering services on the dark web. The tiny handful of us following the story rolled our eyes, though there were a few interesting clues. The article said he’d previously worked “for an offshore private bank (which was under investigation by the US authorities as a ‘foreign financial institution of primary money-laundering concern’).” 

There he’d “learned about the murky and complicated world of ‘shadow banking’, secret offshore accounts and sophisticated financial structures”.

I rang William Cash, the journalist who did the interview, and his reaction was noteworthy. He was chatty until I said the words “George Cottrell”. “I can’t talk to you about that piece,” he said and slammed down the phone. 

At the time, the only journalist to dig further was a Westminster outsider, Nico Hines, working for the US website the Daily Beast. Among his discoveries was that Cottrell was one of just 71 LinkedIn followers of Moldindconbank, a Moldovan bank that was alleged to be at the very centre of the “Russian Laundromat”. Hines writes that it had a sideline in funnelling payments from the Kremlin to far-right European politicians. Cottrell’s other interests included the now-sanctioned Russian banks VTB and Alfa Bank. 

In 2018, with the journalist Peter Jukes I gained access to a cache of emails that revealed a whole chain of correspondence between Arron Banks and the Russian ambassador in which he was introduced to a businessman who offered him gold and diamond deals. Days after the story broke, Banks came to parliament – with Andy Wigmore – to give evidence to the DCMS committee and, during the hearing, Conservative MP Damian Collins brought up George Cottrell.

Mrs Justice Steyn laid out what happened next in the judgment document from my trial:

This was not true. A few days later, in collaboration again with Peter Jukes, I published another story in the Observer. Peter and I reported that Wigmore had sent Cottrell’s confidential legal documents to his contact in the Russian embassy, Sergey Fedichkin, a man who worked alongside another diplomat who Banks refers to in his memoir as “the KGB’s man in London”. 

You don’t have to rely on my word here. Mrs Justice Steyn had access to the original emails and in the judgment she lays out the multiple meetings that Banks had with the ambassador – in contrast to the “one boozy lunch” he claims in the press. And she included this one:

Why did Wigmore think the Russian embassy was interested in George Cottrell? Why did he send the docs? Why did he tell Damian Collins that he hadn’t? Why did he claim he didn’t even have them? Why was this meeting not publicly disclosed? We don’t know any of it. Neither Banks or Wigmore responded to my press inquiries. And not a single outlet followed it up. 

In its new podcast, the Sunday Times alludes to a relationship between Cottrell and Scot Young, a banker to Roman Abramovich, the ex-owner of Chelsea football club, now sanctioned by the UK government. Young was found dead in mysterious circumstances, having apparently thrown himself from a Mayfair window – a “suicide” that’s been linked to a series of Kremlin-linked assassinations (these deaths, including Young’s, form a chapter in Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent hit book about a London schoolboy who died after impersonating the son of a Russian oligarch). 

That connection first surfaced on an anonymous blog a decade ago and is denied by Cottrell. But what isn’t in the public domain is what a relative of Cottrell’s told me: that Cottrell was a teenage friend of Abramovich’s son, Arkadiy. 

Certainly, Abramovich’s sister, Sophia, was in his extended social circle – an Instagram friend of his one-time girlfriend, Georgia Toffolo, a Made in Chelsea influencer who starred on I’m a Celebrity. 

The Sunday Times has yet to push Cottrell’s Russia connections. Awkward questions still lie that way. 

What was it that first attracted Nigel Farage to convicted fraudster and money laundering expert George Cottrell? We don’t know and Cottrell has engaged the most famous and expensive media lawyers in London to fend off exactly these sorts of questions. In fact, the Nerve has found that Nigel Farage and George Cottrell share the same lawyers: Dominic Garner and Claire Gill at Carter-Ruck.

In the last weeks, Gill and Garner have responded to press inquiries on behalf of Cottrell and issued a defamation threat on behalf of Farage. 

Before lawyers take on clients, they undertake a “conflict check”. For Farage and Cottrell to share the same lawyers, it means there is no conflict; their interests are aligned. It’s a puzzling data point given that Cottrell’s donations to Reform – a private company that Farage controls – are now the subject of a police investigation. 

Carter-Ruck is not the only London media lawyer working overtime. Over the last two months, the Nerve has been investigating another cryptobillionaire and Reform donor: Christopher Harborne. We’ve been engaged in extended correspondence with Schillings, another high-end firm, about his involvement in the 2019 general election. 

That involvement is now the subject of a lawsuit that Harborne is taking against ex-Reform deputy leader Ben Habib. Habib claims the 2019 election was a stitch-up; that there was a financial deal between Johnson and Farage for Farage to stand down his Brexit party candidates. In return – Habib said – Harborne gave them £1m a piece. 

But George Cottrell also played a significant role in that election. One that, even at the time it was happening, caused alarm. Because the Brexit party was running what, to  the outside eye, looked like looked like in the wrong hands, could be a nod to money laundering."

The headlines in the rightwing media were that the Brexit party had inspired an army of ordinary people across the country to put their hands in their pockets to show their support. They were sending hundreds of thousands of donations by PayPal, and Farage was building a genuine grassroots campaign. 

And here was the twist, first reported by Turlough Conway in Byline Times: under UK law, donations under £500 don’t have to go through “permissibility” checks. Anything over that and the party has to establish the donor is a UK citizen and on the electoral roll. 

It was a matter of minutes to check what that meant. I sent donations to the Brexit party in dollars, roubles and euros … and guess what! They were all happily accepted. 

The more alarming thing I discovered was that George Cottrell was back. Two separate sources at the time told me he was now the Brexit party’s treasurer. And this week, a former Reform insider shared a screenshot of a 2019 email from George Cottrell that appears to confirm this. It thanks him for his offer of a donation and gives him the bank details:

The former insider reacted in alarm, emailing Gawain Towler to point out the individual appeared to be a money launderer:

But even at the time, this is what it looked like from the outside:

PayPal wouldn’t respond to my press inquiries. The Electoral Commission’s hands were tied: the donations were beneath the limit. But it was also obvious that splitting a big donation into thousands of much smaller sums that were beneath the donation limit and automating that with a computer script was more than a theoretical possibility. 

The Brexit party denied any wrongdoing. Theirs was a genuine grassroots movement funded by the people, they said. But also, we now know, £13.7m from an offshore cryptobillionaire. 

That was the amount that Christopher Harborne donated to the Brexit party – now Reform – that year. Except those of us following closely in real time had no idea. Those donations weren’t visible until the campaign was almost over and the results of the 2019 general election were almost in.  

And it was all happening in the ongoing clamour of the Brexit news cycle. I felt like I was screaming into the void – Twitter – but there was a single person who noticed the story and reached out to me during this time wanting to understand the mechanics of it: Gordon Brown. 

His intervention was a speech, in May 2019, which included a brilliant turn of phrase. Farage, he said, wasn’t a man of the people. He was a man of the PayPal. And it led to results. 

The Electoral Commission announced it would visit the Brexit party’s head office and conduct an audit. 

That autumn – 2019 – I was invited to a meeting in the Electoral Commission’s offices. It was a depressing time. I’d watched the Met police close its investigations into the breaches of electoral law that the Electoral Commission had referred their way. Banks had filed his lawsuit against me. There had been one more outstanding case: the Electoral Commission had referred an investigation into the “true source” of Arron Banks’s £8m donation to Leave.EU to the National Crime Agency (NCA). 

It had traced the donation to an entity in the Isle of Man, an offshore jurisdiction under UK electoral law, and said it had “grounds to suspect” the money may not be British. 

That September, the NCA announced it had closed the investigation. It traced the donation to the same Isle of Man company, owned by Banks, and it ruled it was permissible under UK law. 

It wasn’t entirely clear why the Electoral Commission had invited me to the meeting. It was my articles that had led to its investigation and then findings against Vote Leave and Leave.EU, but it wasn’t a cosy relationship. I had sent them endless press inquiries and freedom of information requests. 

I wasn’t the only person concerned about the PayPal donations, it turned out. Nor did I have to explain what a tech-literate person acquainted with offshore accounts could potentially do. That possibility was abundantly clear to them too. But there was nothing they could do. The donations were beneath the legal limit. 

It was the NCA decision and the commission’s concerns about it that was the real shock. It was taking legal advice. At stake, it believed, was a newly legalised pathway for foreign money to enter UK politics and it was considering the extraordinary step of legally challenging the NCA on its interpretation of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA), the law that governs UK elections. 

The Isle of Man is a “dark” jurisdiction. UK authorities have no visibility into where money arrives from. That is why the commission referred it to the NCA. But the NCA’s decision effectively treated the Isle of Man as onshore for the purposes of political donations, a decision that alarmed the Commission. 

In its view, the NCA had created a new loophole, and the commission had said as much in a public statement published in various newspapers on the day the NCA announced the conclusion of the investigation, expressing their concerns about the “apparent weakness” in the law, “which allows overseas funds into UK politics.”

I didn’t find out what happened next until months later. It wasn’t the commission that took legal action, it was Arron Banks. He sent a “letter before claim” – a legal letter threatening defamation proceedings against both the commission and its director. 

This only became public when the commission agreed to “amicably settle”. It issued a joint statement and deleted three pages from its website. The pages included the reasons behind its original referral to the NCA and the statement above, previously published in the UK press, about the creation of a loophole that could allow foreign funds into UK politics. 

If you go looking for it  now, this is what you’ll find: 

No public body can afford to fight a defamation claim. It’s why anti-Slapp campaigners say that London’s media lawyers are a threat to democratic accountability. It’s not journalists and politicians who’ve been caught in the dragnet, but institutions too. 

The existence of a loophole for foreign funds to enter UK political parties was erased from the official record. The record has gone. The loophole is still there. 

Many years later, that same NCA ruling would have a consequential and outsize impact on me. I initially won my case, on public interest grounds, against Arron Banks for repeating a claim – in a tweet and a Ted talk – previously made by MPs and published by the Guardian that he’d lied about his relationship with the Russian ambassador. But at appeal, the judges ruled that public interest defence “fell away” after the NCA closed its case into the “true source” of Banks’s donation to Leave.EU – the same NCA case that the Electoral Commission had considered challenging. 

The appeal judges upheld the majority of the judgment but it held that I was liable for any views of the talk since the NCA ruling, even though I didn’t control the website – Ted did – and it wasn’t even in Britain. It awarded Banks costs. That decision is being challenged in the European court of human rights, a process that may take years. 

You’ll have read or heard about the collapse of the so-called “rules-based order” in the last few years, but it collapsed much earlier for me. 

It’s now accepted that the alarm bell I sounded over Silicon Valley tech platforms was ahead of its time, but the one I sounded over how foreign money could be funnelled directly into UK political campaigns has not just been ignored: it’s been dismissed, ridiculed, caricatured, denied. Public figures and news outlets have helped manufacture that consent. 

Not a single mainstream journalist outside of the Guardian and Observer reported on my trial. One month before Russia invaded Ukraine, evidence about Farage’s main funder and his relationship with the Russian government tumbled out in open court and was unanimously ignored. 

Meanwhile, it exposed how uniquely vulnerable our institutions are, how politically compromised, how helpless we are in what has felt to me like a slow motion coup d’état. 

A decade of silence and denial is over. For a brief moment, we can breathe the cool fresh air of pure facts and evidence. Even the Telegraph has been tentatively joining in, though judging by the coverage on the Spectator and GB News – both owned by Paul Marshall –  suggest that at least one rightwing media baron is still Team Farage. 

But the gloves are truly off at the Times. This week, it gave over its main leader page to attacking Farage. Murdoch, famously, follows rather than leads. He backs winners. And there’s blood in the water now. 

I already knew many of the details that underpin the Sunday Times investigation last week. I’ve been talking to the same brilliant open-source investigator – One Finance Guy – whose revelations underpin much of the Sunday Times reporting. 

But I could have never landed this plane. It was nothing short of a miracle that (with the team now behind the Nerve) we managed to create the blast area we did with the Cambridge Analytica revelations. As soon as the story moved on to Brexit, it died: killed by Murdoch, Marshall and their helpers, domestic and foreign. And I was turned into Codswallop the conspiracy theorist. The mad cat lady. Misogyny was a weapon so powerful it became a truth distortion field that nobody could even see. 

The Sunday Times should enjoy their moment. This was a shot that only they could fire with such spectacular effect. And I applaud them for following the facts. 

But this isn’t a separate story to the one I’ve been trying to tell for a decade. It’s the exact same cast of characters. The same loopholes in our electoral laws. The same questions. I hope that finally Britain will follow the money. Wherever that ends up leading.